Cognitive or

thinking skills
Today there is international recognition that education is more than just
learning knowledge and thinking, it also involves learners' feelings, beliefs
and the cultural environment of t he classroom.
Nevertheless, the importance of teaching thinking and creativity is an important element in
modern education. Benjamin Bloom was the first to develop a highly popularised hierarchy
of six thinking skills placed on a continuum from lower to higher order skills:
knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.
According to this system, lower order skills included
recalling knowledge to identify, label, name or describe things.
Higher order skills called on the
application, analysis or synthesis of knowledge, needed when learners use new information
or a concept in a new situation, break information or concepts into parts to understand it
more fully, or put ideas together to form something new.
Bloom's structure was a useful starting point and triggered many applications to school
activities and curricula.
Bloom's taxonomy
HOTS
LOTS
What each term implies...
As Byram (1998: 7)points out,
an appropriate framework for language learning and teaching today
needs to focus on three distinct aspects:
an integration of
linguistic and cultural
learning to facilitate
communication and
interaction
a comparison of others and
self to stimulate reflection on
and questioning of the
mainstream culture into
which learners are socialized.

The potential of language
teaching to prepare learners
to meet and communicate in
other cultures and societies
than the specific one usually
associated with the language
they are learning.